Constantina Zavitsanos
L&D MOTEL
15 Sep - 20 Oct 2019
Constantina Zavitsanos, L&D Motel, 2019, installation view
A gallery space that is a long dark channel with black walls, wooden floor, and red light. There’s a display case on the right wall in the middle ground. Laser light glows from the display case. There is diffused red light atop the opposing wall. The space between the case and the wall across from it is empty, with a long view of a wooden ramp that curls up the back wall. Two corridors flank the back wall. A soft red glow fills the space behind the back wall.
A gallery space that is a long dark channel with black walls, wooden floor, and red light. There’s a display case on the right wall in the middle ground. Laser light glows from the display case. There is diffused red light atop the opposing wall. The space between the case and the wall across from it is empty, with a long view of a wooden ramp that curls up the back wall. Two corridors flank the back wall. A soft red glow fills the space behind the back wall.
CONSTANTINA ZAVITSANOS
L&D MOTEL
15 September – 20 October 2019
Organized by Alex Fleming and Andrew Kachel
PARTICIPANT INC presents L&D Motel, an exhibition of new work by Constantina Zavitsanos and the artist’s first New York solo exhibition. L&D Motel features an installation of infrasonic sound built into the architecture of the gallery, transmission holograms, and open captions. Zavitsanos’ practice approaches the fundamentals of perception and experience. In these investigations, they use notions of incapacity, debility, and “access” to trouble distinctions between sensing and feeling.
Our world contains things that double, not halve, when cut. Like metonyms or synecdoches, parts open onto wholes. Zavitsanos’ transmission-based holograms are activated by lasers that concentrate the first visible frequency of light on the light spectrum, or the lowest frequency humans can see – also referred to as the color “red.” Unlike a reflection hologram, a transmission hologram creates an image by projecting light through the hologram itself. When you cut a transmission hologram in half, the holographic image does not split; it doubles.
Zavitsanos’s holograms bear images of dice hovering in mid-throw. They are images of fused instability. Our incapacity to distinguish multiple dice from a trajectory of a single die occupying multiple points in time/space frustrates any attempt to count or individuate what we are seeing. This allusion to chance evokes contingency and risk, but also a certain precarity of the holograms themselves, as the lasers that activate the holograms exist in dialogue — and in tension — with the low frequency infrasonic waves emitted in the adjacent work.
Not unlike the doubling through cutting that is latent in the holograms, the exhibition’s open caption video corresponds — albeit not in an attempt at direct translation — to two texts recorded over one another that form the basis of the infrasonic sound work. Captioning is used to render speech visible through subjective description of sound through language. Closed captions are captions one can turn on or off. Open captions, also known as burned-in or baked-on captions, fuse text to image and cut through the lower half of the image, actually doubling and stacking what arrives through the frame. Open captions preceded closed captions, which were developed as an accommodation for hearing viewers for whom captioning would supposedly detract from or deplete visual experience.
The infrasound and ramp structure used in Zavitsanos’ installation resonates in a range below that which is audible to humans. This range is felt as vibration inside the body. To record the track that is presented infrasonically, Zavitsanos utilized tactile audio devices and worked on a vibrating platform, adjusting frequencies and phasing during production and editing, sculpting sound by feel. Here, touch and sound arrive together, indivisible. The holographic principle of string theory maintains that a description of the volume of a space is encoded on a two-dimensional boundary of that space. A part standing in for a whole, but also perhaps one sense describing another — a slight touch standing in for a heard sound. Not an equivalence, but a redistribution of sense.
Constantina Zavitsanos works in sculpture, performance, text, and sound. Zavitsanos' work deals in the material re/production of debt, dependency, and means beyond measure. Zavitsanos has exhibited at the New Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, The Kitchen, and Artists Space in New York; at Arika Episode 7 in Glasgow, Scotland; and at Fri Art Kunsthalle in Fribourg, Switzerland. With Park McArthur, they co-authored the texts “Other Forms of Conviviality” in the journal Women and Performance (Routledge, 2013), and “The Guild of the Brave Poor Things” in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (MIT Press, 2017). Zavitsanos lives in New York and teaches at The New School.
L&D MOTEL
15 September – 20 October 2019
Organized by Alex Fleming and Andrew Kachel
PARTICIPANT INC presents L&D Motel, an exhibition of new work by Constantina Zavitsanos and the artist’s first New York solo exhibition. L&D Motel features an installation of infrasonic sound built into the architecture of the gallery, transmission holograms, and open captions. Zavitsanos’ practice approaches the fundamentals of perception and experience. In these investigations, they use notions of incapacity, debility, and “access” to trouble distinctions between sensing and feeling.
Our world contains things that double, not halve, when cut. Like metonyms or synecdoches, parts open onto wholes. Zavitsanos’ transmission-based holograms are activated by lasers that concentrate the first visible frequency of light on the light spectrum, or the lowest frequency humans can see – also referred to as the color “red.” Unlike a reflection hologram, a transmission hologram creates an image by projecting light through the hologram itself. When you cut a transmission hologram in half, the holographic image does not split; it doubles.
Zavitsanos’s holograms bear images of dice hovering in mid-throw. They are images of fused instability. Our incapacity to distinguish multiple dice from a trajectory of a single die occupying multiple points in time/space frustrates any attempt to count or individuate what we are seeing. This allusion to chance evokes contingency and risk, but also a certain precarity of the holograms themselves, as the lasers that activate the holograms exist in dialogue — and in tension — with the low frequency infrasonic waves emitted in the adjacent work.
Not unlike the doubling through cutting that is latent in the holograms, the exhibition’s open caption video corresponds — albeit not in an attempt at direct translation — to two texts recorded over one another that form the basis of the infrasonic sound work. Captioning is used to render speech visible through subjective description of sound through language. Closed captions are captions one can turn on or off. Open captions, also known as burned-in or baked-on captions, fuse text to image and cut through the lower half of the image, actually doubling and stacking what arrives through the frame. Open captions preceded closed captions, which were developed as an accommodation for hearing viewers for whom captioning would supposedly detract from or deplete visual experience.
The infrasound and ramp structure used in Zavitsanos’ installation resonates in a range below that which is audible to humans. This range is felt as vibration inside the body. To record the track that is presented infrasonically, Zavitsanos utilized tactile audio devices and worked on a vibrating platform, adjusting frequencies and phasing during production and editing, sculpting sound by feel. Here, touch and sound arrive together, indivisible. The holographic principle of string theory maintains that a description of the volume of a space is encoded on a two-dimensional boundary of that space. A part standing in for a whole, but also perhaps one sense describing another — a slight touch standing in for a heard sound. Not an equivalence, but a redistribution of sense.
Constantina Zavitsanos works in sculpture, performance, text, and sound. Zavitsanos' work deals in the material re/production of debt, dependency, and means beyond measure. Zavitsanos has exhibited at the New Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, The Kitchen, and Artists Space in New York; at Arika Episode 7 in Glasgow, Scotland; and at Fri Art Kunsthalle in Fribourg, Switzerland. With Park McArthur, they co-authored the texts “Other Forms of Conviviality” in the journal Women and Performance (Routledge, 2013), and “The Guild of the Brave Poor Things” in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (MIT Press, 2017). Zavitsanos lives in New York and teaches at The New School.